Inspiration: Hungry Mother Organics, Encouraging Backyard Farms

What a noble effort to encourage backyard farms and urban gardening.! I would love to be part of it if I lived in the U.S.

Hungry Mother Organics has long wanted to not just sell produce, but get the average person to grow it, as well. Now the local farm is starting a 1,000 Backyard Farms campaign, along with the non-profit F.O.C.U.S. (For Our Country United States) to track and map the growth of the local food network in the Carson Valley and Reno area. Earlier in the year, Backyard farmers of any size were encouraged to sign up their gardens or farms with the campaign. Gardeners who sent a photo or rough sketch of their garden plan and their location to stacey@hungrymother.cc was entered to win $150 worth of soil and plants from Hungry Mother, which was awarded in May.

The idea was to discover how many people are already growing their own food, and how much they’re growing. This data will be used to create an interactive map, which will be available at 1000backyardfarms.org. “Ultimately, we hope to use the information to determine the number of backyard farms in the region, the acreage of the farms and estimated total food yield,” the website states.

Also part of this effort is a new Backyard Farmer Association. Roughly 35 people attended a meeting of the group in early April at Hungry Mother’s roadside stand in Carson City. The group, with a yearly membership fee of $25, will hold monthly classes and meetings featuring special speakers and opportunities to swap ideas, tools and produce. Meetings were also held after the contest.

5 days agoby jonell_gallowayEveryone loves salt and pepper except when it comes to their hair. Hair changes, bodies change. Our comfort zone is threatened. Our mothers didn’t teach us how to act and feel with grey hair and wrinkles. They never talked about how the transition felt. Do the rules change? Do people’s reaction to us change when white starts to show? Is that the end of our sexual attractiveness and the beginning of old age and decrepitude? In any case, I’ve decided to take the leap and blue is my theme color (to match my eyes). . . . . . #goinggray

7 days agoby jonell_gallowayIt's time to make castagnaccio, a chestnut cake made with flour, olive oil, walnuts, and pine nuts, and manafregoli, a chestnut polenta made by cooking flour in milk, using chestnut flour from the Garfagnana in Tuscany. These dishes are best made, I'm told, with the freshly ground flour, which I can buy straight out of a jute sack at the market. It's so prized that it even has a DOP. In Lucca, chestnuts are often marked simply "neccio," the local dialect, and you also see Farina di Neccio della Garfagnana. I also used it in my Thanksgiving stuffing.⠀ .⠀ .⠀

5 days agoby jonell_gallowayThese lupini clams, brought straight from the boat in Viareggio half an hour away on the coast, were so fresh they were practically howling, and they were plumper and meatier than the often tasteless vongole veraci usually used to make spaghetti alle vongole. I much prefer them. Here I was opening them in a slow-cooked garlic, parsley and white wine broth. Once opened, I removed them and cooked the juices and broth down for 20 minutes with a bit of tomato, after which I added the almost-cooked linguine to toss it briefly with the cooking juices. This is one of